[Info-vax] Out with Hurd, in with OpenVMS

[John Wallace]

On Aug 19, 1:48 am, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net>
wrote:
> seasoned_geek wrote:
> > On Aug 15, 9:54 am, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae... at gsi.de> wrote:
> >> Neil Rieck schrieb:
>
> >>> On Aug 9, 5:47 pm, seasoned_geek <rol... at logikalsolutions.com> wrote:
> >>>> We can only hope they bring someone in who actually understands what
> >>>> they have.
> >>>> Maybe we can petition for them to bring in Ken Olsen?
> >>> Now this is the best thing I've seen suggested in the newsgroup in a
> >>> long time. Why Olsen? He ran DEC from 1956 to 1992
> >> ... and into the ground.
>
> >>> and only posted two
> >>> quarterly losses.
> >> after which he was ousted and left Palmer the mess
> >> that finally killed DEC.
>
> >>> How many companies can make this claim today?
> >> What claim? DEC wrote a lot of red ink in the 1990s.
>
> >>> Neil Rieck
> >>> Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
> >>> Ontario, Canada.
> >>>http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/OpenVMS.html
>
> > Palmer was the mess that finally killed DEC
>
> I think that is a vast oversimplification.  DEC was a company out of
> control!  There was a corporate "vision" of becoming the new IBM.
>
> DEC could not or would not compete on price.  Purchasing departments
> around the world could not see spending seven or eight times the price
> of third party hardware for genuine DEC.
>
> I used to own a DEC Rainbow.  A hard disk for it cost something like
> $2200 from DEC.  I paid for $300 for a third party drive that worked
> perfectly.  DEC wanted $700 for the memory chips to "max it out".  I
> wound up paying $32 for third party RAM chips that worked perfectly.
>
> DEC wanted $5000 for an X86 machine.  The world was paved with competing
> hardware at $1000-2000.  DEC designed a unique floppy drive and
> contended that only 5-1/4" floppy disks sold by DEC would work.  That
> worked only until somebody wrote a program to do the DEC style format on
> third party hardware.   People didn't buy DEC's $5 floppy disks!
>
> The world changed and DEC failed to change with it!
>
> DEC killed DEC!
>
> Palmer just made the funeral arrangements!

It might be more accurate to say that the world changed and much of
DEC eventually changed too, but too late, and parts of DEC didn't do
enough to let prospective customers know it had changed, or to let
prospective customers know what they were getting for their money.

The story that DEC prices were uncompetitive is oft repeated. Whilst
it may well have been true for the product examples quoted above in
that particular era, and for many others, lessons were eventually
learned (at least by some people) and prices were eventually quite
competitive, especially between Alpha boxes and "competitive" RISC
boxes. But maybe you were out of the business by that time? Certainly
plenty of people had formed the same impression as Richard, but if you
stuck an Alpha in front of them and told them how much it cost, they'd
often be very very very pleasantly surprised. Getting that word out to
the customers was a bit of a challenge though.

Of course there were still folks at HQ who wanted to keep the revenue
up and "average system values" high by selling add-ons, rather than
keeping revenue up by increasing sales volumes, which was a shame,
especially for those who eventually lost their jobs as a result of
that attitude.

There were a couple of other factors which are often conveniently
forgotten.

1) Qualification and support

If DEC said it was supported, it was supported. So when a cheapskate
system builder phones up to say his mixed-vendor setup was having
(e.g.) disk issues, and it turns out he's using non-RZ SCSI drives,
what does he expect his supplier to do except say "do you get the same
problem with a supported drive"? And of course they usually didn't.
There was a reason for that. SCSI disks are just one example.

2) Guaranteed supply at times of industry shortage

Back then, industry shortages happened from time to time e.g. memory,
disk drives, etc. DEC generally had long term contractual arrangements
for critical components with vendors that guaranteed priority of
supply. Again that doesn't come for free. Somebody buying memory or
disk from a broker selling surplus could find themselves without a
supply at times, and there'd be folk desperate for memory or storage
who would happily have paid more than the DEC retail price simply to
get stock. But there was a shortage, so long standing loyal customers
got priority.

That's how I remember it anyway.